Accessing remote content from computing devices, especially mobile computing devices, can be frustrating. Mobile devices connect to the internet through relatively slow cellular connections. For example, with contemporary technology, to download a web page on a cell phone may take on the order of a couple of seconds to establish a cell tower connection, followed by several more seconds/tens of seconds to perform the download.
It is generally not desirable to simply pre-fetch as much remote content as possible, as often as possible, to make it available locally. For one, remote content (e.g., web content) changes frequently, and thus pre-fetched content can quickly become stale, e.g., news and social network websites tend to change very often. For another, cell phones and mobile devices in general have limited battery and/other resources, whereby attempting to continuously or fairly regularly update pre-fetched content on a mobile device can quickly drain the device's battery and render it unusable. Still further, some device users incur data download charges, which means they may pay for and/or use up their download size limits only to obtain stale content and/or a large amount of non-desired content.